The Spanish, totally unprepared and outgunned, made a desperate attempt to reach the open sea with the American battleships and cruisers in hot pursuit.

[11] Cervera's own misgivings reveal the seriousness of the situation faced: Lacking a clear strategy, the Spanish policymakers at home may have hoped to end the war quickly in a "glorious defeat" against the more powerful US Navy.

[14] Captain Fernando Villaamil, the Second Officer in the Ministry of the Navy and a pioneer in destroyer warfare, disagreed with Cervera's passivity and advocated Spain to offset American naval superiority by scattering the fleet and taking the initiative through quick and dispersed actions.

Ultimately, Cervera did none of those but managed to evade the US fleet for several weeks, confounded his American counterparts, and recoaled in the process before he finally sought refuge in the harbor of Santiago de Cuba.

[18][page needed] The Spanish squadron consisted of the cruisers Almirante Oquendo, Vizcaya, Infanta Maria Teresa, and Cristóbal Colón in addition to Villaamil's destroyers Plutón and Furor.

[20] The most well-protected ship in Cervera's fleet, the second-generation armored cruiser Cristóbal Colón, had not even had her main battery installed[20] and carried wooden dummy guns instead.

With Cervera's fleet bottled in Santiago, Captain General Ramon Blanco y Erenas, the top military commander in Cuba, ordered it to sortie from the harbor along the coast westward to Cienfuegos.

He strongly considered fleeing under protection of night but opted to sail by day instead to ensure the safe navigation of his ships through Santiago's narrow channel.

As the historian James C. Rentfrow argues, the American victory at Santiago was, in many ways, the culmination of an "ongoing process towards [the North Atlantic Fleet's] construction as a combat unit.

To bolster the force, US Navy Secretary John D. Long ordered the battleship USS Oregon to sail from Mare Island, California, to join the fleet in the Caribbean.

[29] Sampson specifically approached Lieutenant Richmond P. Hobson, the commanding officer, charging him with the task to "sink the collier in the channel" in order to both blockade the Spanish fleet and to clear the narrow passage of any mines.

The newly-developed torpedo boat was charged with guarding Sampson's flagship when he broke the blockade to perform "frequent inspections, attacks, and pursuits," according to a correspondent aboard the New York.

For his part, Cervera was content to wait in the hope that bad weather would scatter the Americans so that he could make a run to a position more favorable for engaging the enemy.

However, US land forces began to drive on Santiago de Cuba, and by the end of June 1898, Cervera found himself unable to remain safely in the harbor, and Governor-General Ramón Blanco y Erenas wanted a sortie: "it is better for the honor of our arms that the squadron perish in battle...."[35] The breakout was planned for 09:00 on July 3.

Thus, the blockade formation that morning consisted of Schley's Brooklyn, followed by the battleships Texas, Oregon, Iowa, and Indiana and the armed yachts USS Vixen and Gloucester.

In the lead was Cervera's flagship Infanta Maria Teresa, followed by Vizcaya, Cristóbal Colón, Almirante Oquendo, travelling at around 8–10 kn (15–19 km/h) and 800 yd (730 m) apart, followed by the torpedo-boat destroyers Plutón and Furor, respectively.

[47] Rather than expose the entirety of his fleet to the American battle line, Cervera had signaled his other ships to continue to the southwest while he attempted to cover their escape by directly engaging Brooklyn, his nearest enemy.

Though Brooklyn was hit more than 20 times during the battle, she suffered only two casualties, and her return fire resulted in the deaths of most of Cervera's bridge crew and grave damage to the ship generally.

Almirante Oquendo was hit a total of 57 times and was driven out of the battle by the premature detonation of a shell stuck in a defective breech-block mechanism of an 11-inch turret, which killed the entire gun crew.

Subsequent claims by Admiral Cervera and later research by historians have suggested that nearly 85% of the Spanish ammunition at Santiago was utterly useless, defective, or simply filled with sawdust as a cost-saving measure for practice firing.

Though modern in every respect and possibly the fastest ship in either fleet, Cristóbal Colón had one serious problem: she had been only recently purchased from Italy, and her main 10 in (254 mm) armament[34] had not yet been installed because of a contractual issue with Armstrong Whitworth.

[53] Her closest antagonist, USS Brooklyn, had begun the battle with just two of her four engines coupled because of her long stay on the blockade line, and she could manage barely 16 kn (30 km/h) while she was building steam.

As Brooklyn ineffectively fired 8-inch rounds at the rapidly-disappearing Cristóbal Colón, there was only one ship in the US fleet with a chance of maintaining the pursuit, Oregon, burning Cardiff coal and New York, doing 20 kn (37 km/h).

Cristóbal Colón had run through her supply of high-quality Cardiff coal and was forced to begin using an inferior grade obtained from Spanish reserves in Cuba.

[54] Vizcaya exploded at 1:20 p.m., Captain Jose de Paredes, declining to see his crew needlessly killed, abruptly turned the Cristóbal Colón toward the mouth of the Turquino River and ordered the scuttle valves opened and the colors struck as she grounded.

Against common practice at the end of a victorious battle, Sampson did not respond with the expected congratulatory remark, but rather, according to historian Joseph G. Dawson, "the answering signal was terse and seemed needlessly brusque.

[65] Shortly thereafter, The New York Sun published an article that quoted Brooklyn's navigator, Lieutenant Commander Albon C. Hodgson, as saying that Schley gave orders to turn "hard aport" when first met by the Spanish fleet.

[67] A court of inquiry opened on September 12, 1901 at the Washington Navy Yard to investigate 24 charges against Schley from his search for Cervera off Cienfuegos to the conclusion of the Battle of Santiago de Cuba.

Tensions died down temporarily, but arose after the publication of Long's personal memoir in which the former secretary of the navy credited Sampson fully and believed that Schley contributed little to the battle's outcome.

In the imperial vacuum left by Spain's New World empire, the United States now exerted considerable influence both in annexing formal territories such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines and in subsequent American military interventions throughout the Caribbean over the next half-century.